Engines of the Broken World Read Online Free PDF

wreaths from the ceiling down there. There were bins of potatoes too, and a few withered carrots that I didn’t like to eat and never had, and the shelves of preserves that Mama had loved to make, labeled in her neat writing. A few in the front were in my sloppier printing, and probably weren’t too good to eat. Somebody had to set them up, and Mama hadn’t had it in her this summer. I cut down a few onions and gathered up a few potatoes in the skirt of my dress, then walked back up the wooden stairs with them.
    I was so carefully ignoring looking at the body that I didn’t notice, until I had unloaded my burden onto the big table—one onion rolling away as always seemed to happen and thudding to the floor, and me dropping to my knees and snatching it up—that Mama wasn’t under there anymore. I fell on my bottom and scrabbled back against the wall, almost plunging right on down into the cellar, and could barely breathe for terror. She was just gone, though the tea towel was resting in a rumpled heap on the floor, as if tossed aside.
    I wanted to shout for Gospel, for the Minister, for anyone, but the words wouldn’t come, and anyways, if she was moving about wouldn’t she hear me too? But she must’ve already heard me: the floor had creaked as I scrambled away, and the stairs before that.
    The floor hadn’t groaned or protested at all while I was in the cellar. If Mama had moved, or if someone had moved her, I should’ve heard it. The floors all creaked in this old house. But I hadn’t heard anything, and that sure as Heaven made it worse.
    I pushed myself up the wall, trying to pretend my legs weren’t like jelly from my fear. My breath was coming fast and hard and making fog in front of my face, the room was still so cold. I took a step away from the wall, toward the front of the room, toward the warmth of the fire and the knife block that was on the counter beside it, where Mama’s old knives, family treasures and always kept terrible sharp, were settled. If it was Mama moving around, like a ghoul for vengeance, a knife wouldn’t do much, but if it was something else, maybe it would help me out.
    With my fingers safely closed around the wood handle of a knife, I looked across the kitchen, out the doorway into the sitting room, and lost my grip. Papa’s old chair sat with its back to the kitchen, so I couldn’t see the face, but a head rested against the back of the chair, hair as dark as Gospel’s but streaked with gray, and now, as goose bumps marched up my arms and my skin went clammy, I could hear her.
    “ Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby. ”
    Just the first line and then she was silent. I knew that voice, I knew the song that she sang to me all my life until she couldn’t do it anymore, until Mama became a raving thing that sometimes recognized us and sometimes didn’t, who most often was harmless and quiet but not always. No, not always. This was my old mama, the soft-voiced one who would sing and read stories and play games, and she was sitting in my papa’s chair, which she never used. Not when she was alive.
    I wanted to sick up, but I was too scared to make a noise. Except she knew I was there, or why else did she sing at me, why else did she sing that song, of all the songs she knew?
    She stirred in the seat as if she was getting ready to turn around, and I ran. I bolted for the back door without even looking behind me or thinking of Gospel, still asleep in the big bed and with only the Minister to look after him and our dead mother stirring not twenty feet from where he was resting, but I didn’t care. I just ran as fast as I could, throwing open the door and springing through the snow, through the beastly cold, with a quilt around my shoulders fluttering like a cape and stocking feet turning into ice and the barn looming ahead of me, but I ran right past it.
    Widow Cally, that was all my brain was screaming at me. Get to the Widow Cally. I didn’t